


He Was Cooler

by Shwoo



Category: Adventure Time
Genre: Gen, Post-Finale
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-02
Updated: 2019-02-02
Packaged: 2019-10-20 22:41:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,453
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17631086
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shwoo/pseuds/Shwoo
Summary: Simon struggles to figure out who the Ice King was to him. Lumpy Space Princess needs a place to crash.





	He Was Cooler

Simon had gone to a lot of trouble to obtain the largest wheelbarrow in Ooo, but he was beginning to have second thoughts about its utility. It was the size of a house, and at first he'd thought that would be a good thing. The less trips he had to make, the better.

It hadn't been until he was filling it up that he'd remembered that the reason most wheelbarrows were small was because most people weren't infinitely strong. Normally, he would have summoned some giant snow--

No. No, not "normally". Nothing about the Ice King had been normal.

Anyway, he no longer had ice powers, so he'd called in some favours. Now he and Finn were pushing on the bottom of the wheelbarrow and having exactly no effect, while a very large Jake did all the work.

Simon kept pushing anyway, and said "Thanks for helping me move in, you guys."

"No probs," said Finn. He shaded his eyes and looked up at the wheelbarrow. "You have a lot of stuff, Simon. Are you sure you need it all?"

"Of course!" said Simon. "I'll keep it in the basement." He'd been called a pack rat a few times, back in the old days, but he just didn't see why he should have to throw things away just because they were old. A lot of them were still useful, and after a thousand years, he had more useful things than ever. Even this wheelbarrow could only hold half of his belongings at a time.

He guessed he could have kept most of his stuff where it was, scattered through the castle in the Ice Kingdom. But he didn't want to have to go back to the Ice Kingdom whenever he needed something, and he didn't really trust Gunter with his things.

Simon had given the Ice Kingdom to Gunter. He probably could have got away with keeping it, but he felt that as long as he was there, he'd never truly able to put the Ice King behind him. So he'd given it to Gunter.

Also, he liked sometimes being warm.

They reached a half-finished house, which was built in what Simon couldn't help thinking of as an old-fashioned style. A lot of the wooden frame was still visible, and there was some scaffolding around it, but it had a working kitchen and bathroom. Simon could wait to finish the rest.

Finn stopped short. "Whoa. You built this already, Simon?"

Jake shrank down to normal size to get a better look. "We were just here yesterday!"

Simon shrugged. "I am a thousand years old. I've had a lot of practice." Or the Ice King had had a lot of practice. He couldn't figure out where to draw the line, although it had definitely been crossed somewhere in the first hundred years or so. "Hey, are you guys still homeless? I could build you a place."

Jake looked like he was about to accept, but Finn said "Me and Jake are gonna rough it for a while."

"Yeah," said Jake reluctantly. "Rough it." He got big and turned the wheelbarrow sideways so that Simon could get into it easily without needing the ladder.

"Well, let me know if you change your mind," said Simon.

Finn stared up at the pile. "Are you sure you don't need help getting it inside?"

"Oh no," said Simon. "It's actually been quite relaxing to sort through it." He opened the front door. "I'd invite you in, but..." He gestured inside at the piles of dirt and randomly placed furniture.

"No problem," said Finn. "Bye, Simon."

"Bye," said Jake.

As they left, Simon heard Jake say, "It's weird how he's so polite now."

Simon sighed, and closed the door. Then he remembered what he was doing, opened it again, and starting carrying his things into the basement, one by one.

He hadn't been lying when he'd said it was relaxing. He had a system. Books went on the left side, close to the door. Memorabilia went in the back left corner. Toys and games went on the right, further from the door than the books. Later, he'd build up a proper library, but for now, he just wanted all his things in one place.

He hadn't figured out what to do with all the Fionna and Cake books he now had, but it didn't feel right to put them with the scholarly texts on the nature of reality, or even with all the spy thrillers. Eventually, he put them in the back left corner, with a note to remind himself to give them a permanent home later.

The basement was cavernous, and the work was more strenuous than he'd expected. But whatever time of life it was that GOLB had reset him to, it seemed to be a time when he'd been in pretty good shape. Maybe the default state of any human was being in shape, from GOLB's perspective. He should look into that, in case it was important.

Simon was half done when he noticed his stomach growling. "Ah, yeah." He often forgot to eat when he got caught up in something. The Ice King had forgotten to eat as well, but he could survive that. Simon was a human, and couldn't.

He made his way out of the basement and into the kitchen to make a sandwich. It was a pretty good kitchen, he thought. It had a blender, a coffee machine, a dishwasher... All the appliances. And he'd already stocked the pantry with food from the Grocery Kingdom. The only thing that could make it better would be someone to share it with, but... he was working on that. One day.

He was adjusting his sandwich's lettuce-to-cheese ratio when the door banged open. Simon dropped the lettuce, ran to the door, and almost collided with Lumpy Space Princess.

"Oof!" she said, although he hadn't touched her. "Simon! Watch where you're going!"

"Lumpy Space Princess!" said Simon. "What's the matter? What happened?" She looked okay, but with beings made of irradiated stardust, who could tell?

"What?" said Lumpy Space Princess. "Nothing. I just need a place to crash for a couple days." She went into the kitchen. "Hey, you made me a sandwich!"

She grabbed it, and stuffed it in her mouth.

"Wh-- Hey!" said Simon. "That was mine!" He'd been beginning to look forward to it.

Lumpy Space Princess didn't seem to hear him. She swallowed. "Simon, that sandwich was terrible, and this place is empty and boring. Don't you have a couch or something?"

Simon took a deep breath. Losing his temper was an Ice King thing, he'd decided. "LSP, you can't stay here." He might have let her stay if she'd asked. He knew she lived in a tent in the woods. But she hadn't asked.

"You have to let me stay, because when you were crazy, you always let me stay in your ice castle, and now you're a good guy, and you gotta keep doing good things," said Lumpy Space Princess. She arranged some dirt into a vague couch shape, and floated above it. "Dummy."

"What?" said Simon. He searched his memory of the relatively short time he'd known her. "No I didn't!"

By letting her stay, did she mean that he'd kidnapped her once or twice? No, that couldn't be it. She hadn't wanted that any more than the other princesses. In fact, she'd managed to make the Ice King almost completely lose interest in kidnapping her, more than a year before Betty had come back and he'd lost the drive. If he hadn't been able to remember it happening, Simon would have called that impossible.

"How would you know?" said Lumpy Space Princess. "You can't remember anything!"

"I can remember, LSP," said Simon. The first time he'd regained his sanity, with Bella Noche, had been like waking up from a long sleep. Suddenly he'd been in the future, in a strange city full of strange wizards, with almost no memory of how he'd got there. It had been easy to think of the Ice King as a completely separate person piloting his body around, leaving nothing but vague emotions and memories.

But this time, it had been more like someone had just flipped a switch in his brain. There'd been no discontinuity at all. One second he'd still been thinking of Betty as "Weird Lady", and the next... "I remember everything."

"What?" said Lumpy Space Princess. She frowned. "Ugh. I'm gonna kill Starchy."

Starchy? The potato man from the Candy Kingdom? Simon didn't know the last time he'd even spoken to Starchy.

The last time the Ice King had spoken to him. He kept forgetting to separate them.

The Ice King had been horrible to Lumpy Space Princess. She did have a bit of a... forceful personality, and she was quite self-centred, but that didn't make it okay to kidnap and insult her. She was definitely old enough to know better by now, but she was also some kind of fully-realised elemental, probably, so he didn't think she could help it.

The Ice King had been horrible to everyone. Simon didn't know he was even going to begin to apologise to everyone, but maybe he could start right now. "You can stay."

"Yeah," said Lumpy Space Princess. "Obviously, I can stay. I'm gonna take a nap on the couch."

She lay down above the dirt couch.

 

_The entity known as GOLB exists without beginning or end, and is believed by most sources to be the embodiment of chaos. GOLB's physical body is located not in a higher plane, as one might expect such a powerful entity to reside, but in a lower plane. [Potentially a plane of negative dimensions? Unsure.] However, ~~his~~ ~~her~~ its psychic emanations are detectable in varying amounts ~~in many places~~ in all tested locations._

_The strength of the emanations strongly correlates with_

There was a crash, and Simon stopped writing and stood up from his desk. "LSP?" he called. "Are you okay?"

The crash had come from below. Was she in the basement? She wasn't snoring on the "couch" anymore. And she wasn't outside. He could tell, because his study only had one and a half walls.

Simon hurried down the basement stairs, and found the room in disarray. His stuff was strewn all over the floor, completely ruining his six sextant system. Lumpy Space Princess was floating between piles, rummaging through them and throwing things around.

"Lumpy Space Princess!" said Simon. "What the bottle are you doing?"

His most pristine copy of Baby Woozlefut and the Wuttlebugs thudded against the wall nearby. "Aw," he said. "That's a classic..."

Lumpy Space Princess continued to ignore him as he walked up behind her. He stopped, trying to figure out what to do next. He didn't want to touch her without her permission, especially after all the Ice King's kidnappings, but she was ignoring him, and he couldn't have her breaking his things and messing up his categorisation system.

Lumpy Space Princess picked up a Fabergé egg, then dropped it. Simon managed to catch it before it hit the ground, and Lumpy Space Princess whirled around, knocking down a scale model of the overpass near his old apartment. "Simon! How long have you been standing there? You really freaked me out."

Simon put the egg down, out of Lumpy Space Princess's immediate reach. "You must have heard me yelling."

"Yeah, but you were all the way back there," said Lumpy Space Princess, pointing to the basement entrance. "What are you, a lumping ninja or something?"

Simon wished. Actually, now that he thought about it, most of his ninja stuff was still back in the Ice Kingdom. Maybe he'd wait for her to leave before he brought it here. His collection had barely survived Finn and Jake a few years back. "What are you doing down here?"

"I'm bored, Simon," said Lumpy Space Princess. "Do you have any video games?"

"No," Simon lied. "This basement is off-limits. Come back up to the rest of the house now, okay?"

"Fine," said Lumpy Space Princess, and followed him back up the stairs. "Whatever."

After they'd been walking for a few seconds, Lumpy Space Princess muttered "You were way cooler, when you were the Ice King."

Simon stopped walking. Lumpy Space Princess floated into him.

"Get out," said Simon.

"I am!" said Lumpy Space Princess.

"You know, you did kidnap me that one time," said Simon. That had at least been an interesting look into Lumpy Space Princess's psyche. Even at the time, he'd managed to pick up on what her Fionna & Cake story had really been about. "I'd say we're square."

Lumpy Space Princess looked annoyed. "What are you talking about?"

"Get out of my house!" Simon yelled.

"Okay, okay," said Lumpy Space Princess. She pushed past him. "You just had to ask. Glob."

Once she'd left, Simon went back to his writing desk, sat with the pen poised above the paper, and tried to think. Where had he left off? GOLB's psychic emanations.

How could anyone like him better as the Ice King? Was Simon really that horrible of a person, that even the Ice King was more likeable than him?

GOLB's psychic emanations. Right. They got stronger the more chaos there was. But maybe he should call it something else, like entropy. Chaos wasn't really a scientific concept on its own. Or at least, not a quantifiable one.

Had he told Lumpy Space Princess the wrong thing? He'd thought he was being more than reas-- No. No more thinking about that. He needed to focus. He needed to set out exactly what he knew about GOLB as a starting point for his search for Betty. It was important to go about this carefully and scientifically, without letting it consume his life.

He hated to admit it, but that was where Betty had gone wrong. Simon would happily sacrifice himself to save her, but that would just put them back where they'd started, with Betty sacrificing herself to save Simon. Either one of them had to let the other go, which wasn't happening, or they had to both be all right.

And he'd make sure they were both all right.

Just as soon as he could concentrate. How could Lumpy Space Princess say something like that? The Ice King had been a horrible person. He'd spent most of his time being selfish and cruel, and the rest of it being delusional and horribly incompetent. He'd had no redeeming qualities at all.

Simon gave up on writing and went back down to the basement. Putting his stuff back in order wouldn't take his mind off the Ice King, but he couldn't focus on writing right now. He'd already spent enough of his life killing himself trying to make deadlines. He'd always loved the research and analysis aspects of his work, but academia itself was a meat grinder.

He wanted to rush through it as fast as possible, but he knew he couldn't help Betty by burning himself out. Whatever else could be said about her current situation, she was at least safe. She was very, very safe. The only time limit was his own lifespan, and maybe how long he could stand the lonliness.

He wished Betty was here with him. It always helped to bounce ideas off her, even when she wasn't really listening. And when she was listening, she was often brilliant.

But she wasn't here. That was the whole problem.

"Hey, maybe thinking of Betty took my mind off of... Oh." The second he'd realised that he hadn't been thinking of the Ice King anymore, he'd started thinking of the Ice King again.

How had the Ice King ever had friends? Had they all just felt sorry for him, or had they had their own self-esteem problems? The Life-Giving Magus in particular had been much nicer than he'd deserved. How many times had Simon-- The Ice King-- tried to exploit the LGM's powers of LG? At least twice. Probably more, but Simon didn't want to think about that anymore.

"I was cooler as the Ice King," Simon muttered, as he walked back and forth through the basement. "Huh. She doesn't know me..."

He snatched a Fionna & Cake book that had been lying upside on the floor. It was a pretty thick one, and had the weirdly punctuated title of "Fionna & Cake: Dinosaurs, in Ooo???" Probably one of what he-- The Ice King-- had called "all-weekers", where he'd done nothing for a week but write and occasionally yell at Gunter.

This thing should back him up. Simon opened the book to a random page.

_"Oooof!" Was what Marshall Lee stated when he landeded on the back of the feersome pteranoddon. "Looks like I've got to use my Vampire Charms." He Quipped._

_Marshall Lee said in a forbiding voice "You will do whatever I say, on this suny day today. [bleh. blah. dear me MAKE A BETTER RYHME love me]" and the simple mind of the horible flying reptile was overwelmed! It was now Marshall Lee's loyal mount._

_Meanwhile Fionna was now in the stomak of the T-Rex. "Oh Gross!" She said drawwing her sharp sword. She swung her sword powerfuly at the stomak lining but the king of tyrant lizards fought back with stomak acid and it gushed out from all the stomak acid glands in the stomak._

Simon caught himself smiling, and forced the smile back. It wasn't well-written or anything, and probably could have benefited from a proofread by someone who could spell, but he was invested in this action scene. He could see what he'd meant, and he thought he remembered what the context had been.

Marshall Lee and Fionna had been arguing about whether how fast they should be getting to the Underworld Time Gem, which would allow them to travel to the past to save Cake and Prince Gumball. Marshall Lee had thought Fionna was being too slow, and Fionna had thought Marshall Lee was being too reckless, which for her, was saying a lot. They'd nearly decided to split up before being ambushed by the dinosaurs he'd just read about. The fight had cemented their faith in each other, in a moment that Simon had imagined as heartwarming when he'd written it. He doubted it actually read that way.

Simon had always been fascinated by the idea of writing fiction, and he'd devoured writing advice books as a kid, but he'd never been a writer himself. He was an academic. Academics were supposed to write scholarly texts, not fun adventure stories, and he wasn't any good at writing anyway. But after he'd become the Ice King, he'd forgotten all that. He'd still felt like he was doing something he wasn't supposed to, but by then, he'd felt that way about most things. So he'd just gone ahead and started writing.

Simon noticed that he was thinking of the things the Ice King had done as things he'd done again. He had to stop doing that. They were different people. He was not the Ice King.

But... a lot of things in the book did read like something he'd write, although he hoped he'd be a bit better at it. He did like the word quip. And the whole concept of getting eaten by a giant monster and having to fight your way out was pretty exciting. The stakes were so high there. Which was the exact reason he'd put that in, if he remembered correctly.

Simon's phone buzzed, and he looked at it to see a picture of Lumpy Space Princess, doing some kind of haughty kissy face, with the caption "Look who's a real host".

Simon squinted at it. Where was she? She was taking up the whole frame, but he could sort of see something... cyan behind her.

She was probably in the Ice Kingdom. That was probably why she'd messaged him specifically.

Simon had calmed down a little, and was beginning to feel bad about snapping at her. Lumpy Space Princess was a horrible house guest, but she hadn't said anything all that bad. In fact, she'd probably just meant that the Ice King was easier to manipulate than Simon, which was probably true. The Ice King had had his limits, but he'd still been a bit of a doormat when he'd thought it would win him acceptance or approval.

Making friends didn't work that way, and Simon had figured that out when he was still a child. Sort of. He'd been twenty, but twenty-year-olds were basically children.

Anyway, he should probably go apologise to Lumpy Space Princess. It wasn't her fault he had issues. And while he was there, he could make sure Gunter was eating properly. As long as Gunter had the crown, he couldn't starve to death, but it was amazing how unhealthy you could get without dying. Simon knew that very well.

 

Simon had always thought of the spot where he'd built his house as not being far from the Ice Kingdom, until he'd gone back to having to walk everywhere. Flying hadn't made it worth it to be the Ice King, but it had been a slight compensation.

After trudging through what felt like miles of snow, he finally reached the castle, which looked the same as always. It was still a mountain with tunnels arranged in a way that the entrances made it look like a face. And Simon still thought it looked cool. Well, he thought it looked good. After a thousand years of making the good-cool-cold pun, he was starting to get a little sick of it.

Gunter must have seen him coming, because he met him at the door. "Gunter!" he said. "Welcome to my humble castle of ice!" He laughed.

"No, you're Gunter," said Simon patiently. "I'm Simon." Gunter's weird, Ice-King like appearance still freaked him out a little, but better Gunter than Simon. He seemed happy, and that was the important thing.

He was a bit worried about what had happened to the crown, though. It seemed like Gunter had absorbed it into his body, leaving only the gems. No more crown meant no more lives ruined, but he couldn't help worrying that something worse was happening.

"Quiet, Gunter, I'm hanging with my best friend Finn!" said Gunter, gesturing for Simon to come in.

The main room hadn't changed much, although Gunter had removed the cage at Simon's insistence. It still felt almost homelike. It was convenient to have most of your things in one room, especially when you lived alone. He remembered having vague plans to renovate a little once he managed to find a princess who'd marry him, but he hadn't been able to make himself believe that would actually happen for very long.

The cold was unpleasant, though. Simon remembered trying to keep it at around two degrees Celsius, which had seemed like a good compromise between the magic he'd had to expend to keep everything frozen, and what guests could tolerate. Now that he could feel the cold again, it wasn't as great a balance as he'd thought.

The Ice Kingdom was much colder than everything around it, and the difference had resulted in a lot of storms at first. That had taken forever to get under control.

"Oh, not again!" said Simon. "That wasn't me, it was the Ice King!" He pressed his hands against his temples. He had to stop thinking like this.

"Simon!" Lumpy Space Princess entered the room, sounding weirdly happy to see him. "You got my invite!"

"LSP," said Simon. "I'm sorry I snapped at you earlier. You can't help being the way you are." He'd thought about it on the way over, and she was definitely a fully-realised elemental. Elementals could be... difficult to deal with.

Lumpy Space Princess looked offended. "Simon, I know you're jealous, of all my confidence, and my hotness, but you're being really insulting right now! You have to try, really hard, to be as much LSP as I am, and if you don't appreciate it, then I don't appreciate you!"

"Wh-- huh?" said Simon. She was acting that way on purpose? Who would choose to do that? "What do you mean? You try to be as much you as you can?" He was supposed to be apologising, but he wanted to avoid doing anything else to upset her. Also, he was curious to hear her thoughts on personal identity.

"Sure, Simon, I'll school you on not being a fake idiot," said Lumpy Space Princess. "I do things, as soon as I think of them. That way I know it's all LSP." She pointed at herself. "No second-guessing for this girl!"

"Huh..." said Simon. "You always act on your first impulse..." Why did that sound so familiar?

"We're gonna hold a princess bash!" said Gunter. "Princesses only, fools."

He knew exactly why it sounded so familiar. "Just like me! Back when I was the Ice King, I always did the first thing that came into my head. I didn't second-guess myself until later. For hours and hours. While... crying."

It was like the reason he'd started writing. When everything seemed like a bad idea, the only way to get anything done was just to do it, and not worry about the consequences until it was too late.

"What?" said Lumpy Space Princess. "We're talking about me, Simon."

Simon barely heard her. "I'd never kidnap anyone. But, I think... I'd think about it." For half a second, until he realised it was stupid and harmful. "Maybe the Ice King is just me, without a filter! Everyone thinks about doing bad things sometimes. But the mental filter... it's meant to catch it!"

It was so hard to admit, or even think about, that he had to say it out loud. But he couldn't keep on like this. He couldn't keep finding ways he was similar to the Ice King and getting upset about it. He had to be completely focused on his Betty search, or it might end in tragedy.

He and the Ice King were the same person.

It was the truth, and even as it made him feel sick, it made him feel slightly better.

"Great effort on the elliptical today everyone!" said Gunter. "We're gonna get swoooooole."

"I worry about you, buddy," said Simon. To Lumpy Space Princess, he added "LSP, I'm sorry I got mad at you for comparing me to the Ice King, and I'm sorry I insulted you. The truth is, I--"

"Huh?" said Lumpy Space Princess. "I wasn't listening. You're sorry?"

"Yeah," said Simon.

"So, you're letting me back into your place?" said Lumpy Space Princess.

Simon choked. "No."


End file.
